


hollow crown

by deckards



Category: Heroes Reborn (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-28
Updated: 2016-01-28
Packaged: 2018-05-16 18:22:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5836027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deckards/pseuds/deckards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“last night an old wolf wearing a crown of thorns crept into my dreams. who else could that be but you, noah?”</i> --- dying is easy; the difficulty comes in living with all the things you’ve done and all the ghosts who stalk your shadow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hollow crown

**Author's Note:**

> special thanks to [ebby](http://eboleiul.tumblr.com/) for her wonderful beta work.

 

>  you think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. but yesterday is all that does count. what else is there? your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. nothin else.
> 
> \---- cormac mccarthy

 

**I. AN OLD WOLF**

When he saw, he knew. And when he knew, he understood; she hadn’t told him the whole truth and it wouldn’t have made a difference if she had. There were things that happened that could not be prevented, this much he’d learned.

That was how it went.

When the boy arrived, he told him so. “Take me back to Gateway,” he said. “To the end of the world.”

 

**II. AND TURN TO DUST**

Memory was a funny thing, the way it brought events in and out of focus. The first words he’d ever said to Sandra, other than ordering a sandwich or asking for the bill, were, “Do you like theatre?”

He hadn’t planned on asking that question; it had spilled out in a jumble of vowels and consonants and for an instant it was like he was back in college, standing on a patch of grass under a weak afternoon sun. It was winter and cold as hell. His breath froze in the air, small clouds hanging in front of his face.

“Do you like theatre?” a boy asked him. He was tall, with short brown hair and deep, dark eyes.

“Huh?”

The boy jutted his chin in the direction of Noah’s chest. “Your books.”

“Oh,” said Noah. He glanced down at the stack of plays in his hands and his hair fell into his face, tickling the end of his nose. He huffed at it, trying to force his bangs out of his eyes.

The tall boy laughed and Noah blushed.

“I suppose that depends on the play,” Sandra said.

“ _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_?”

Sandra smiled at that. “Didn’t peg you for the romantic sort.”

Noah let a lopsided grin slide across his face.

The tall boy, he was older and he laughed easily. He talked Noah into going to a student performance of _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ and when it was over and the two of them were standing alone in the dark the boy leaned down and kissed him.

The first time he kissed Sandra was when he walked her home after the play.

He told people it was his favourite of Shakespeare’s work, but what he meant was it was the thing which connected him to two people he’d loved and lost and sometimes it helped him forget there was another person between them who wanted to name their unborn child—a daughter, she was certain—Imogen.

\----

When Thompson offered him a position with the Company he didn’t hesitate and he never questioned anything he was asked to do and he never thought of himself as a murderer until he put a bullet inside his partner and watched him disappear from a lonely bridge on a sunny afternoon.

After that, orders started to sound like threats instead of commands and he knew that if he hid his daughter someone would be told to shuttle him out to a secluded piece of infrastructure.  He wasn’t surprised the task fell to Rene, but in his idle fantasies he always escaped or died trying and he certainly didn’t expect to drive himself like he had driven Claude to that same empty bridge. He chose the spot and he said to himself it was the symmetry of the thing he liked, but he knew it was more like an apology. It was an offering on the altar where he’d sacrificed his friend: a tribute or a self-martyring or a misshapen act of contrition.

When he saw the painting of his body crumpled on the ground and bleeding, his hand jumped to his side, to the pale scar under his ribs. It was hard to remember the pain in any exact sense; it burned and later it ached and for a while the wound pulled his skin in odd directions and the bundles of scar tissue were never quite comfortable, but there was always something nebulous about the memories. They shifted in odd ways, were fuzzy and out of focus.

He relied on the vagueness of his recollection to make it easier to pull on the grey jacket he’d been painted in and walk out the front door. He hadn’t wanted to die, had fought as hard as he knew how to avoid it, but in the end, it wasn’t difficult to do. There were things he couldn’t prevent: that was how it went.

After he was brought back to life, the scar wasn’t there any more. Claire’s blood had cured him of that, too.

 

**III. SUMMON UP THE BLOOD**

“Once more unto the breach, eh, friend?” said Claude, and Noah nodded, his hands tensing around his gun.

They were hunting another special, in Florida this time. It was too hot and sweat was running into Noah’s eyes and his shirt felt glued to the small of his back and the moist air was heavy in his lungs.

It was easy to lie to Sandra about where he was and what he did. She was a gentle soul and she didn’t need to know about the world he waded through, full of darkness and killers and sharpened teeth like the blades of knives flashing under streetlamps.

No one asked many questions about paper sales; the stories he told were simple and bland and easy to remember. He was in Florida for a sales conference. They were trying to break into a new market, him and Claude. Or they were introducing a new card stock. Primatech had a process for recycling pulp that was more efficient than ever. After a polite nod, people moved on to talk to the teachers or doctors or writers, anyone with an anecdote better than the one Noah kept repeating about getting a paper cut in the break room. The less interesting he seemed the less he had to speak and the less he had to speak the easier it was to obfuscate the truth. Being boring had a tactical advantage and Sandra didn’t seem to mind; he always came home and he was always happy to see her and he had a respectable salary and they had a good life. It was all very clean and very simple.

The special they were hunting had led them into a swamp. There were giant insects and muddy waters and Noah wanted this finished so he could have a shower. At his side, Claude was gone, disappeared into the reeds and the humidity.

The sun sliding behind the horizon lit the sky up with burning reds and long black shadows fell across the area, jagged bars cutting the scenery into lonely segments. Noah called out the name of the target, hoping it would make him show himself, and it did. Before the stranger had time to hide again Claude was on him and that was the end of that.

Another mission completed, another target bagged and tagged, and the world a little safer for it.

So it was easy to lie to Sandra and to her friends and to their daughter.

\----

It was a feeling like hunger. A vast emptiness in the pit of his stomach, a dull ache, a rage burning below his skin keeping him warm. Keeping him moving and standing and talking. Some days, it was all there was, the shimmering anger, so close to the surface of his mind he could feel it like a presence behind every thought and every word and when people spoke to him he ground his teeth together and clenched his fists, driving his fingernails into the palms of his hands.

The feeling, he’d been living with it for so long now he couldn’t remember what life was like before, except in little flashes and brief moments. He found ways to distract himself. Sandra helped, like Thompson said she would. At first he thought it was just sex, but she was less interested than him and when that started to cool, to become repetitious and mechanical, there was still something that dulled the edges of his fury. When he realized that, he started to think maybe he could love someone again.

Work gave him a place to put the feeling outside himself; let him use it to burn up his targets, find ways to put it away and calmly plan his next meticulous course of violence.

That went on for a long time, until Claire changed his mind.

After that it was less like anger and more like panic and for a time, it was almost like the feeling wasn’t there at all and he suspected that maybe this was called happiness. That didn’t last, so he chased it like an addict after a high; he tried to help, tried to save, tried to do what he thought was right. He said, “I don’t remember helping anyone,” and it was true, even though he swore that at the time, that’s what he’d meant to do. Or that’s what he’d talked himself into believing.

After June Thirteenth, he realized that anymore he didn’t know how to pray. He didn’t know when he’d given up on Heaven and Hell and God and Satan. Maybe it was after Kate was killed or maybe it was when he realized he had made his own hell and he systematically dragged other people down into it with him under the pretext of orders and protection and the greater good.

The feeling, it was always there after that but he pushed it down and hid it away in a little space in his mind and sometimes he took it out and let it wash through him but mostly he just went about his day and pretended to be normal and stopped thinking about redemption and salvation and instead he sold cars, and that was fine.

There were things that happened that could not be prevented, he knew that.

He also knew, when the short man with the ginger beard followed him down the street, that he’d been waiting all this time for someone to find him and tell him what to do, just like he’d been waiting all those years ago for Thompson.

 

**IV. A CROWN OF THORNS**

Dying was easy and he’d done it before. It hurt more than he remembered this time or it took longer. The sort of burning, he didn’t have a word for it: it simply was. Agony, maybe, but the kind you got used to over time. The kind that was so utterly consuming it narrowed your entire world until it was the only sensation left and being awake meant being in pain and that was how it went.

When it was over, everything was grey. The edges of his vision were filled with darkness and the voices came from far away, sounded muffled and wavering like he was hearing them from underwater.

I am

so proud

of you both.

His eyelids were heavy. When he got home after long work trips, Claire used to run down the stairs to see him. She took them two or three at a time, crashing so heavily she must have been damaging the floorboards.

So proud.

There were things that happened that could not be prevented, this much he’d learned.

That was how it went.

 

 

end


End file.
